The evolution of automated photo slideshows on personal computers, projected displays, printed media, and entertainment devices has grown stagnant. Display of images is usually limited to a single image in the viewing area at any given time. Transition or animation effects that are arbitrarily applied, such as fade-ins or fade-outs, often accompany display of an image. This procedure for displaying images is not as engaging to the viewer as what is possible to create manually. For instance, a manually created slide show with multiple overlapping images displayed at once is much more interesting, however it is also very time consuming to create. Automating the presentation of multiple overlapping images in a viewing region is not something that is commercially implemented, because of the high opportunity for failure by cutting an interesting portion out of an image, or worse yet, by cutting a critical feature, such as, for example, a face out of an image.
Simply displaying an image centered (or even strategically placed) in a television or video screen can be wasteful of screen space in the viewing region. This is especially true with wide screen and high-definition televisions, since there is much more room and resolution with which to display images as compared to traditional televisions. This also holds true for images in projected viewing regions and in print media viewing regions. Likewise, shrinking multiple images down to display them side by side in a viewing region is also wasteful of viewing region space because it leaves unused area in the viewing region surrounding the images. FIG. 1 is prior art and shows a traditional layout orientation 100 of displaying multiple images (101 and 102) concurrently in a shared viewing region 600.
Such traditional display techniques also tend to be wasteful of image content. For instance, in a given image, there could be an interesting portion of the image and a boring or less interesting portion of the image. If the entire image is displayed, then the same importance is given to displaying both the boring and the interesting portions. Further, when multiple images are displayed concurrently in a viewing region, one image may contain more interesting content than another image. If the interesting image and the boring image are scaled to the same size and displayed side by side, this is wasteful of viewing region space, since unused space will surround the displayed images.
Display in this traditional fashion is also less interesting to the viewer than it could be. For instance, if the boring part of the boring image had been eliminated or minimized while the interesting image had been maximized or more prominently displayed relative to the display of the boring image, the display would be more interesting and less blank space would be left in the viewing region.
Thus current methods of concurrently displaying one or more images have significant disadvantages associated therewith.